There have been some recent posts here flaming AT&T, Netscape, and people like Matt and Jeff who work for them. These posts seem to come out a paranoid mindset that distrusts any institution with power, and a romantic idea that the cypherpunks are subversive idealists fighting for truth and justice in the face of overwhelmingly powerful opponents. The truth is that several important institutions have contributed a lot to the fight for privacy. That may not be romantic, and it may not fit well with some people's adolescent fantasies, but it is what's actually happened. The New York Times, the most influential paper in America, has consistently argued against censorship on the net. MIT, one of our most prestigious universities, has taken on the free distribution of strong crypto tools and lent considerable credibility to Phil Zimmermann. AT&T funded the research Matt Blaze did which deomonstrated that a forge chip would interoperate with an escrowed one. If we had to pick one single thing that killed clipper, it would probably be that deomonstration. Netscape not only put crypto into its products, it's opening them up so that they'll talk to other people's products. This is a big step forward: even if Netscape caves into GAK, you'll be able to talk to one of Sameer's Apache-SSL servers in the Netherlands. GAK is unenforceable if standards are open and interoperability is possible. And despite the complaints of many here, Netscape has taken a strong stand aginst GAK and ITAR. Even Microsoft's Bill Gates has apparently written well and persuasively aginst GAK. None of this is conincidental, and if you don't understand why you ought to read Friedman's "Capitalism and Freedom". We are not extremists. There is nothing extreme about believing that an email you send to your spouse or your friend ought to be private, or that people ought to be able to read and write about whatever subject interests them. The extremists are those who are fighting so hard to preserve the possibility of totalitarianism.